The Most Private Property

Every passage, on the record.

1. 00:00Claim · condensed

   As a Bitcoin holder, being able to store your excess energy in Bitcoin puts you in a significantly better spot than if you hadn't.

2. 00:35Claim · condensed

   It doesn't matter whether you're an individual, a corporation or a nation state: every entity and the people running it have the same goal, to solve for how to generate wealth the most efficiently. Wealth is just a sloppier version of information.

3. 01:05Claim · condensed

   Information is the physical embodiment of order, and order represents energy that has been transformed to a higher level of utility by increasing its density or removing friction from accessing it.

4. 01:43Claim · condensed

   Whether private property is serving the extended order comes down to a simple test: is information generation made easier, meaning less input for an increase in output? If it's more efficient it sticks around; if it's not, it gets outcompeted by a system that is.

5. 01:43Reference

   whether it is serving the extended order and therefore the individuals who make up that extended order becomes quite simple in this frame

6. 02:16Analogy

   If we lived in a Garden of Eden where we had access to all and any kinds of energy we desired at any time, we wouldn't need private property, because the energy would already have been transformed into the most efficient storage and access device possible.

7. 02:16Claim

   Private property is the answer to the question of how to deal with scarcity in the most efficient way possible.

8. 02:52Quote

   Scarcity is reality.

9. 03:25Quote

   No one can move your hand for you.

10. 03:25Claim

    You cannot give up the rights to moving your hand. Someone else can move it in a physical sense, with their hand or with an instrument, but control over your own body, over your own information, cannot be passed up.

11. 04:02Claim · condensed

    Anytime you use your information to generate further order by combining it with knowledge or know-how, so long as you don't aggress anyone else's property in the process, the resulting information is also yours. This is the Lockean idea of homesteading: combining your labor with the natural resources and energy reserves that are there, transforming them into something with a higher density of energy, and the results are yours.

12. 04:02Reference

    this sort of leads us into the Lockean idea of homesteading, where you're combining your labor with the natural resources

13. 04:02Claim · condensed

    If you transform energy from inaccessible to accessible and then don't get to control it afterward, there is less incentive to generate that information in the first place.

14. 04:40Claim · condensed

    Your goal is to survive, and survival means having access to as much energy as possible to deal with whatever the unknown and unpredictable universe throws at you next.

15. 05:11Quote

    All you're doing is gambling energy.

16. 05:11Claim · condensed

    Without the guarantee that you'll be able to access that energy in the future, expending energy to transform energy to a higher quality and then losing control of it is just gambling with reserves you were already running low on. Where information that is already generated gets transferred without permission, energy moves from producers to non-producers inside the extended order.

17. 05:53Claim · condensed

    Rewarding non-producers and punishing producers actively dilutes the valuable members of a society, and over time a system that does this gets outcompeted by one that doesn't.

18. 06:25Claim · condensed

    The clearer information is and the less noise it carries, the easier exchange becomes, the more people can specialize, and the more they can experiment with knowledge and know-how to generate the efficiency gains, processes and products that an economy with private property produces more of.

19. 07:12Claim · condensed

    Whether you're denied control of information at the moment it's generated or it's removed from your control afterward doesn't matter: both leave an economy with less energy reserves, because both are less efficient. Private property has to be respected to counteract that.

20. 07:43Claim · condensed

    People get wooed by the idea that some other system will generate more information or more energy reserves than private property, but to date this simply hasn't shown to be the case.

21. 08:14Claim · condensed

    The easier way to think about private property here isn't the textbook definition, ownership of tangible or intangible property by an individual entity rather than by the state or a common owner, it's the Lockean method: labor combined with natural resources or products, producing something that doesn't belong to someone else.

22. 08:46Claim

    Private property requires time: there needs to be a before and after agreed upon for the ledger that keeps track of who owns what to exist. We need to know who did what to the natural resources in the first place, and when.

23. 09:17Claim · condensed

    When matters just as much as who, because it decides whether you're building on someone else's private property and prior knowledge and know-how, or generating reserves entirely on your own.

24. 09:17Claim · condensed

    In Bitcoin, for the sacrifice of consuming energy now, you're able to claim a certain percentage of the total returns allowed inside the Bitcoin economy by sharing that energy at a given time, and you're able to keep claiming those rewards from then until you decide to pull that ownership from the system yourself.

25. 10:01Claim · condensed

    No one else can claim your Bitcoin rewards for you, and everything builds on top of the energy stack you provided to the network in the first place. That's why being early to Bitcoin generates significantly larger energy reserves: it takes less energy in to claim a larger percentage of a network while it's still small.

26. 10:37Claim · condensed

    Private property needs a ledger of when something happened and what followed from that point, and that lines up closely with what Bitcoin, as a tool, is actually doing.

27. 11:07Reference

    this is outlined much more eloquently than I will be able to do that here in Bitcoin is Time by Gigi, one of my favorite pieces

28. 11:07Reference

    this is outlined much more eloquently than I will be able to do that here in Bitcoin is Time by Gigi, one of my favorite pieces

29. 11:07Analogy

    Bitcoin is a clock. A consensus is arrived at by the network at a specific tick of the clock, a tick of the ledger; every ten minutes a new block is formed, and that is the tick.

30. 11:38Claim · condensed

    We don't know what the next block is going to contain, but we can all agree on the state of the network, the distribution of UTXOs, at this given block height. We have causality and unpredictability in the future at the same time.

31. 13:08Claim · condensed

    If a non-private-property system produced more energy reserves than private property, we'd have a fight on our hands, but the Lindy effect says private property is the most efficient system we have.

32. 13:08Reference

    the Lindy effect of private property is the most efficient

33. 13:39Claim · condensed

    The question is how to remove the constraints on private property so it's allowed to generate as much as possible and live up to its full potential, and once you know the shortcomings, you know what a tool that removes them would be worth.

34. 14:13Claim · condensed

    Physical property has, for most of human history, been almost the entirety of property, and it can be violated through physical aggression, which skews incentives down to a simple calculation: are you better off producing with your own labor and resources, or waiting for someone else to produce and then taking their energy reserves by force.

35. 15:11Claim · condensed

    Property with high defense costs and low attack costs, which describes all forms of physical property, skews incentives, and those skewed incentives trickle down through every level of actor in the economy, reducing the total energy reserves the economy is able to generate and access.

36. 15:50Claim · condensed

    Real estate, fiat money and stocks share the same defect as physical property in general: if it can be taken through physical force, the same calculation applies, whether the force expended is less than the transformation being stolen.

37. 15:50Reference

    we have entire episodes have been devoted to the shortcomings of real estate, the shortcomings of fiat money

38. 17:05Claim · condensed

    Real estate gets easily confiscated, stocks get easily wiped out, issued under you or split, and fiat money gets debased again and again through inflation, with little that any individual element of the extended order can do to shield their property from it.

39. 17:40Claim · condensed

    We simply don't know how much we're leaving on the table by not having a ledger of private property, showing who owns what, that is transparent, simple, accessible at all times, constantly updated and impenetrable to anyone who wants to change it without consent.

40. 18:27Claim · condensed

    In the physical world these ownership problems can't be fully solved, only drastically reduced, through the monetary premium those properties pick up. If something exists that doesn't require moneyness to spring up and that upends the incentive structure for physical attack, moneyness gets pulled out of every area that is less conducive to being the perfect property.

41. 19:10Quote

    You are your Bitcoin.

42. 19:10Claim · condensed

    If the seed phrase or private key exists only in your head, you are your Bitcoin, and just as you can't give up the right to move your own hand, no one can make you move your Bitcoin without your consent. The only way to access that energy is to trade with the person who holds the rights to it.

43. 19:45Claim · condensed

    Not being able to seize someone's property without consent incentivizes cooperation and voluntary value exchange, which increases the total information inside an economy.

44. 20:16Analogy

    Bitcoin is a black hole for moneyness in other property, for the inefficiency of other properties at storing access to future energy reserves, and it will only increase over time.

45. 20:16Claim

    The current system has to steal from people, it's set up that way, and if it doesn't do that at an ever-increasing rate, it eventually collapses under its own weight.

46. 20:48Quote

    Bitcoin is the only thing you can ever truly own.

47. 20:48Claim · condensed

    That's true in the sense that Bitcoin is the highest, most private form of private property.

48. 21:20Claim

    Without private property you cannot have true prices, because true price information increases energy efficiency inside the extended order, and that's only possible where private property exists. Without it, prices are set rather than discovered, set by a central organization, with significant negative effects on exchange and energy allocation.

49. 21:56Idea

    Information leakage occurs over space and over time as it grows further and further beyond the capacity of a human byte, of how much an individual human is able to retain. The larger that information set grows, the lower the probability that an individual is able to compute what's needed to efficiently determine prices.

50. 22:38Claim · condensed

    The actors generating information directly are better able to determine the value of that energy than those further removed from the process, and keeping decisions local lets people in a free market exchange on selfish best practices, maximizing their own energy gains at every interaction.

51. 22:38Analogy

    Who is going to accurately gauge the value of a pound of peanuts: the farmer whose direct action produced them, or a bureaucrat a thousand miles away?

52. 23:42Claim · condensed

    The farmer has a far more intimate awareness of his own energy needs and what he's willing to exchange than anyone removed from that process. The further removed, and the more people setting prices are from the actual production, the noisier the signal becomes, and the less positive impact prices have for the extended order.

53. 24:18Claim · condensed

    We want the extended order to be as efficient as possible, because that's better for you and for me: if everyone is better off, everyone has more energy, more of it easy to access, and information, knowledge and know-how can spread across more and more human bytes.

54. 24:48Claim · condensed

    A small win at the local level, over the alternative, compounds across the whole extended order into an almost inconceivable advantage, because none of this has ever been possible before.

55. 25:19Prediction · condensed

    Bitcoin is going up forever, because of its absolute scarcity and because no one can make any more of it.

56. 25:52Claim · condensed

    The ability for Bitcoin to not be confiscated, to escape all the other limitations of physical property, is a much less discussed benefit than the price going up, but it can be just as impactful in the long run.